Austerity, A New Weaselword

The financial press has become inundated with the word “austerity.” Since Greece’s left-wing Syriza proclaimed an “anti-austerity revolution,” strong adjectives, like “incredibly savage,” precede that overused word.

What was once a good word has become a weaselword. That, according to the Oxford Dictionary, is “a word that destroys the force of a statement, as a weasel ruins an egg by sucking out its contents.” How could that be?

Well, in the hands of an unscrupulous or uninformed writer, the inversion of a perfectly good word into a weaselword is an easy task. All one has to do is leave the meaning of a word undefined or vague, rendering the word’s meaning so obscure as to make it non-operational. With that, a meaningless weaselword is created.

In its current usage, the word austerity is so obscure as to evoke Fritz Machlup’s paraphrase of Goethe’s line from Faust: To conceal ignorance, Mephistopheles counsels a student to misuse words. Such is the story and fate of austerity.